Herodotus
Introduction Herodotus of Halicarnassus hereby publishes the results of his inquiries, hoping to do two things: to preserve the memory of the past by putting on record the astonishing achievements both of the Greek and the non-Greek peoples; and more particularly, to show how the two races came into conflict.note These are the confident opening lines of Herodotus' Histories, and the Greeks who heard them must have been surprised. Preserving the memory of the past by putting on record certain astonishing achievements was not unusual, but the bards who had been singing legendary tales had been less pretentious. Even the great poet Homer had started his Iliad in a more modest way: Sing, goddess, the wrath of Peleus' son Achilles, that brought endless harm upon the Greeks. Many brave men did it send down to the Underworld, and many heroes did it yield a prey to dogs and vultures. In this way, the counsels of Zeus were fulfilled, from the day on which Agamemnon -king of men- and great Achilles first fell out with one another. And which of the gods was it that set them on to quarrel? The similarity between these two prologues is obvious: we are about to hear a tale about a terrible conflict and the speaker wants us to understand how the two sides came into conflict. The difference is striking, too: Homer invites a goddess to relate the story; Herodotus does not need divine aid. Who was this man, who so proudly gave his personal opinion about the past? Herodotus' Life Not much is known about Herodotus' life. The only reliable source we have is the book he wrote, known as The Histories, and this remarkable text gives us some clues that enable us to sketch the outlines of its writer's life. As its prologue shows, Herodotus was born in a town called Halicarnassus: modern Bodrum in southwestern Turkey. Not far from Herodotus' native city is the island Samos, which figures so prominently in The Histories, that it has been argued that Herodotus spent several years on it. The same argument applies to Athens: Herodotus may have spent some time in the leading Greek city of his age. It is unknown when or why he left his home town. Two or three centuries after Herodotus' death, scholars from Alexandria assumed that the historian was banished because he had been involved in an abortive coup attempt. Unfortunately, there are many ancient historians who were forced to spend part of their lives abroad after a political failure (e.g., Thucydides, Theopompus of Chios, Timaeus, and Polybius of Megalopolis). Probably, it is safer to ignore this piece of scholarly speculation. The famous Macedonian philosopher Aristotle of Stagira (384-322 BCE) must have heard or read The Histories. In his book on Rhetorics, he quotes its first line: Herodotus of Thurii hereby publishes the results of his inquiries...note An easy way to explain this variant reading of Herodotus' opening line is that Aristotle was simply mistaken. However, the philosopher's infallibility has been axiomatic for centuries, and many scholars - ancient and modern - have tended to believe that Herodotus was one of the settlers in the South-Italian city Thurii, which was founded in 444 BCE. A medieval dictionary, the Suda, mentions Herodotus' tomb on the market of Thurii (Suda H536); this was a high honor, only attributed to the (often legendary) founders of new cities. Of course it is possible that Herodotus was the founder of Thurii, but probably we are better advised to take the Suda's statement with a grain of salt, especially since Athens and Pella (in Macedonia) also claimed his tomb. It is imaginable that the Thurians have invented theirs after reading Aristotle. The year of Herodotus' death is unknown, but we have two clues. Herodotus mentions the execution of two Spartans in Athens,note about which we also know from another source, Thucydides. It happened in the winter of 430/429 BCE. Therefore, Herodotus was still alive and writing in 429. Since it is also known that in the summer of 429 many Athenians were killed by the plague, it may be conjectured that Herodotus was one of the victims of this disease. However this may be, he must have died before 413, because he tellsnote that a certain village in the neighborhood of Athens, Decelea, was never plundered by the Spartans, something that did in fact happen in 413, as Thucydides tells us.note Assuming that Herodotus died between 429 and 413, it is reasonable to infer that he was born between 500 and 470. Perhaps we can be a little bit more precise: nowhere in The Histories does he claim to have witnessed the great Persian War (480-479 BC) that he is describing. Therefore, his date of birth can be estimated in the eighties of the fifth century BC. The author of The Histories seems to have been a real globetrotter. If we are to believe him, he was no stranger in Babylon, where he interviewed the priests; he claims to have gone north to the Crimea and south along the Nile; he visited Sicily and knows the details of North-African topography. However, some doubts are possible: e.g., his description of Babylon is contradicted by archaeological evidence. On the other hand, in his description of the Crimea, he mentions a king known to have lived around 460, which makes it likely that he really visited that part of the world. That he was able to write, is a fact easily ignored. However, it tells us that his parents could afford a teacher and were well to do. Herodotus must have been a rich man, possibly a member of the old aristocracy. We may speculate that he fought as a heavy armored infantryman (a hoplite), like all Greek men of his class and age. This would explain why his descriptions of battles are always from a soldier's point of view and sometimes confused. He was a soldier, not a general. This is all we know about the Father of History: frustratingly little. Yet, there are only a few ancient writers that we know as well as Herodotus. Other authors wrote longer texts, were greater historians, or reached greater intellectual heights, but none of them is able to convey the same feeling of intimate friendship that we experience when we read Herodotus. We meet him when he is in a dark mood, share his surprise, know his religious opinions, hear him chattering, joking and babbling. There is no ancient author whose character we know so well as the man about whose life we know so little. The solution to this paradox lies in The Histories Herodotus' Originality Today, The Histories are usually edited in one volume. In Antiquity, nine scrolls were needed to contain the entire text, and it is still usual to divide The Histories into nine 'books'. As the Italian classicist Silvana Cagnazzi has pointed out, it is possible to subdivide every 'book' into three units, the logoi (overview). When a person reads one of these logoi to an audience, he or she needs about four hours, and it is likely that this is how Herodotus first 'published' the results of his inquiries: as a lecture. This idea corroborates an ancient story that he used to recite his work. (On one occasion, a boy started to cry: the future historian Thucydides, who was deeply moved by Herodotus' narrative.) It is likely that at one point Herodotus decided to collect his logoi in one continuous text. But now he faced a serious problem. His logoi were about very dissimilar subjects - e.g., a description of Egypt, a logos about Scythian customs, and a narrative about Persian diplomacy in the winter of 480/479 - and it was likely that this collection of logoi would become a messy whole. Herodotus has recognized this problem, and decided to group everything around one single theme: the expansion of the Achaemenid (or Persian) empire between 550 and 479. Lectures on topography and ethnography now became integrated chapters of a historical chronicle. Stories about the past were something that the Greeks primarily knew from the beautiful epic poems of Homer, who had sung about the valiant deeds of past heroes in the Iliad and the Odyssey. Herodotus was heavily influenced by this example. Sometimes he quotes the legendary bard; or he uses words that any Greek would have recognized as homeric. The Iliad contains a catalogue of nations that took part in the Trojan War; in Book Three, Herodotus sums up all Persian provinces, and in Book Seven, he inserts a list of troops that took part in Xerxes' expedition to Greece. Sometimes, Herodotus copies scenes from Homer. In his description of the Battle of Thermopylae, he tells how the Spartans and Persians fought about the body of Leonidas. This is impossible in a hoplite-battle (the type of warfare Herodotus is describes) but echoes a scene from the Iliad in which the Greeks and Trojans fight about the body of the hero Patroclus. A very important borrowing from Homer is the circular composition. More than a hundred times, Herodotus interrupts his narrative to digress on a subject. The longest digression is Book Two: Herodotus announces that the Persian king Cambyses wanted to conquer Egypt, and then begins to talk about the geography, the customs and the history of the ancient country along the Nile. Finally, at the beginning of Book Three, Herodotus resumes his narrative and describes the Persian invasion. The digressions belong to the most entertaining parts of the Histories. For example, we read an interview with an employee of an Egyptian mummy factory, an astonishing anecdote about the first circumnavigation of Africa, a hilarious tale about Indian goldmining, a report about the sources of the Nile and the Danube, a reconstruction of the language of the prehistoric Greeks, a cautionary tale about deposits, and lots more. A final point of similarity between Herodotus and Homer is the impartiality of the narrative: Homer's heroes are the Greeks, but his Trojans are no villains, and in the same way Herodotus portrays his Greeks and Persians - he treats both parties without partiality or hatred, but with genuine sympathy. It is interesting to compare this with the historiographical texts from the oriental monarchies: the Persian shah - e.g., the Behistun inscription - and the Egyptian pharaoh leave no doubt about the wickedness of their opponents. But Herodotus is more than just a pupil of Homer who added geographical and ethnographical bits and pieces to his unbiased epic tale. A first difference is that Homer was a poet using a complex meter, whereas Herodotus composed his logoi in prose. But the greatest difference is the fact that Herodotus was a real researcher, an empiricist. (In fifth century BC Greek, the word historia still meant 'research'; it was Herodotus' achievement that the meaning of the word changed.) He traveled a lot in order to investigate the cities and opinions of man. Where Homer claimed to be speaking the truth depended on his inspiration from the muses, Herodotus based his narrative on research. It is a tribute to the quality of Herodotus' geographical descriptions that the works of his predecessors are now lost. As a corollary of Herodotus' empiricist method, he is interested in the recent past. Homer had told about distant, legendary antiquities; Herodotus was interested in events that were in living memory and could be verified. For example, he seems to have interviewed the survivors of the Battle of Marathon. Admittedly, interviews are an unreliable source, but it must be said that Herodotus did a remarkable job: when we can check The Histories, it often turns out to be trustworthy. Even though Herodotus makes some serious mistakes, he managed to give a pretty accurate description of the century before his birth. As it turned out, Herodotus invented a new literary genre: history. He did so by integrating the results of empiricist ethnographic and topographic research into epic, and writing this in prose. This combination was revolutionary. It is odd that he was hardly appreciated in Antiquity. People admired his entertaining way of telling stories, but they did not believe them. The first to criticize the Father of History was Thucydides, who rejected Herodotus' religious explanation of what was happening. In later times, nobody dared to believe what Herodotus told about strange customs. For almost two thousand years, people considered him just a teller of (excellent) tales and thought that all these strange customs were merely inventions. His never ending stream of tall, short and winding tales earned him not one but two nicknames: to some, he was the Father of History, but to others, he was the Father of Lies. Only when, after the discovery of the Americas, the Europeans learned to know the customs of hitherto unknown people, the reappreciation of Herodotus started. But even today, many of his claims are the subject of debate. Herodotus on Causality Herodotus is interested in the causes of the war he reports about, an interest he shares - to a certain extent - with Homer. The legendary bard, it will be remembered, started the Iliad with a request: Sing, goddess, the wrath of ... Achilles ... Many brave men did it send down to the Underworld ... In this way, the counsels of Zeus were fulfilled, from the day on which Agamemnon ...and great Achilles first fell out with one another. And which of the gods was it that set them on to quarrel? Homer discerned an immediate cause ('which of the gods was it that set them on to quarrel?') and a deeper cause ('the counsels of Zeus were fulfilled'). As we will see, Herodotus makes a similar distinction between immediate and deeper, divine causes. But he uses these concepts to explain a war, not a quarrel between heroes. Homer was not interested in war as such; to him, the Trojan War had been nothing but a stage for the real drama, the wrath of Achilles. That wrath had caused much grief, because Zeus had wanted it so, but the causes of the war itself were unimportant. Homer did not really want to know how and why the Greeks and Trojans had come to blows. Herodotus, however, has a lot to say about the causes of war. It has his special interest, which comes as no surprise when we remember that he was writing The Histories during the outbreak of the Archidamian War (431-421 BCE). He mentions his interest in the prologue: Herodotus of Halicarnassus hereby publishes the results of his inquiries, hoping to do two things: to preserve the memory of the past . . . . and to show how the two races came into conflict.note After these words, Herodotus tells some legendary tales that could have been told by any poet of his age: he presents us with a Greek saga about the causes of the wars between East and West, and adds Persian and Phoenician accounts - stories that he may have heard in the docklands of Halicarnassus or any town along the Mediterranean shores. Perhaps there is a homeric echo, because Herodotus' stories all have something to do with captive women; a quarrel about captive women can also be found in the first book of the Iliad. But in section five of Book One, Herodotus abruptly changes the subject. So much for what the Persians and Phoenicians say; and I have no intention of passing judgment on its truth or falsity. I prefer to rely on my own knowledge, and to point out who it was in actual fact that first injured the Greeks.note This man was the Lydian king Croesus, who conquered the Greek towns in Asia, and thereby put into motion a violent system of attack and counter-attack. According to Herodotus, Croesus became overconfident after his successes against the Greeks, and recklessly attacked the Persians, who retaliated and conquered Lydia and its Greek subjects (maybe in 547 BCE). After a generation or two, the Greeks rose in rebellion, being helped by Athens. The Persians suppressed the rebellion, and -thirsty for revenge- attacked the Athenians, who defeated the invaders at Marathon. The Persians swore to avenge themselves, but Xerxes' expedition in 480 was a disaster; now it was the Greek turn to attack. For the modern reader, this seems too simple: it is unlikely that all human affairs are determined by this pattern of action - reaction. But Herodotus offers a more sophisticated interpretation of the events, for which there are no homeric parallels: no doubt, the Persian Wars were caused by the imperialist habit of the Persians. This is clearly indicated by the compository principle of The Histories: the Persians successively subject the Lydians, the Babylonians, the Indians, the Egyptians, the Scythians (although not all of them), the Libyans, the Thracians... Sooner or later, the Greek were to fight the ever-expanding Persian Empire. 'Imperialism' is therefore the real cause: not only was Herodotus the first one who asked why people fought a war, but he was also the first one who gave an abstract answer. These two levels of causality are human. There is, however, a third, deepest, religious layer in Herodotus' thought, which he shared with bards like Homer. More than once, Herodotus states that the gods are envious of human happiness: the powerful will once be tempted to act beyond their means and be destroyed. Time and again, the gods tempt mortals to transgress the limits that are set to human greatness (Greek: hybris), so that even the greatest kings lose everything they have (example). An illustration is the story of the Persian king Cambyses' behavior in Egypt. After he has conquered Egypt, he becomes reckless and attacks the holy Apis bull (the story is untrue, but that is not what interests us now), orders his brother Smerdis to be executed, begins an incestuous relation with two of his sisters, kills the son of his vizier, has twelve noblemen buried alive, and finally desecrates the Egyptian tombs and mummies. It is obvious to Herodotus, that Cambyses has transgressed certain limits. When he tells the story of Cambyses' death, he makes it clear that it was a divine punishment. Upon hearing about the rebellion of the Persian magoi, Cambyses leapt upon his horse, meaning to march at speed to his capital and attack the disloyal magos. But as he was springing into the saddle, the cap fell off the sheath of his sword, exposing the blade, which pierced his thigh - just in the spot where he had previously struck Apis the sacred Egyptian bull.note Herodotus was not the only one who thought about causality in theological terms. That hybris invoked retribution, was a pious and traditional explanation for the downfall of kings and the ensuing disasters for kingdoms. Even the gods are - according to Herodotus - subject to this law, and human piety towards the gods cannot prevent mortal beings from misery. When Croesus, the devout king of Lydia who has sent unmatched presents to the god Apollo and his oracle in Delphi, is defeated by the Persians, he asks the god if it is the habit of Greek gods to be so unappreciative. The god of Delphi replies that not even he can escape destiny; even though he had been eager that the downfall of the Lydian monarchy occurred in the time of Croesus' sons rather than in his own, he had been unable to divert the course of Fate. Herodotus' Sources Herodotus claims to have visited the whole known world. Among his informers, he has priests from Greece, Egypt and Babylon; Africans, Arabs, Carthaginians, Cypriotes, Egyptians, Greeks, Italians, Palestinians, Persians, Phoenicians, Scythians... everyone seems to have been cooperative, and these interviews must have been Herodotus' most important source. Like a good journalist, Herodotus offers his audience different versions of the same event: not only does he offer a Greek account of the Persian raid on the Greek temple in Delphi (8.37) and the appearance of two supernatural helpers that reverted the Persian assault, but he has even been able to find a Persian informant of this divine intervention - thirty years after the event! This is too good to be true, and there are more incidents where Herodotus' spokesmen are suspiciously well-informed. We are to believe that the Egyptians and Persians remembered the legendary war between the Greeks and Trojans. Babylonian priests give a description of the Esagila, the temple of their god Marduk that according to modern archaeologists does not fit the actual situation. As we have seen, Herodotus was not only known as the 'father of history' but also as the 'father of lies'. It has been argued by the German classicist Detlev Fehling, that when Herodotus mentions his source, this is almost the best proof that he is not telling the exact truth. Unsatisfied with the real events, he decided to improve upon them, making it possible to show better the meaning of the events. There is a lot to be said for this suggestion; at least, it is almost certain that Herodotus did not go to Babylon. Some have argued that Fehling's criticism is a bit far-fetched. After all Herodotus had to write his tale many years after he had visited the place, and he never had the comfort of a map. This will no do: the Halicarnassian researcher wants us to believe that the walls of Babylon are 100 meters high - if he had indeed seen the town himself, he would not have written down such nonsense. Sometimes, it is possible to check Herodotus' information. Comparison with cuneiform texts learns that almost every Persian name that he mentions, matches a real name. For example, Herodotus names the Persian leaders Cyrus, Cambyses, Hystaspes, Darius I the Great, Xerxes and Artaxerxes I Makrocheir; these are the Greek equivalents of Kurush, Kambujiya, Vishtaspa, Darayavaush, Khshayarsha and Artakhshaça. Courtiers receive plausible names as well, and this indicates that Herodotus was well-informed about the Persian court. (If he simply was making up things, the names would have been wrong. Other Greek authors' Persians have very un-Persian names.) Herodotus must have had (indirect) access to at least two written Persian sources. In the first place, in Book Three, he is able to tell the story of Darius' coup d'état in considerable detail, and in line with the official Persian propaganda. We know the official story about the revolt of the Magians and Darius' accession to the throne from an inscription that was found in a town called Behistun (west of Hamadan in modern Iran). It tells essentially the same story; the only detail that Herodotus has wrong is the name of one of seven conspirators. Book Three also contains the second document, a list of provinces and revenues of the Achaemenid empire, which resembles comparable Persian documents (e.g., the Daiva inscription of Xerxes). A third document - written in Greek - seems to be the source for the catalogue of Xerxes' army in Book Seven. In section 146 Herodotus tells us what kind of document this is. In the winter of 481/480, three Greek spies were sent to Sardes, where the Persian army was gathering. As has already been pointed out, Herodotus was a rich man, and well-educated. He knew the literature of his age: he quotes not only Homer, but also Hesiod, Sappho, Pindar, and Aeschylus. The latter was a playwright, and indeed, its seems that Herodotus sometimes used tragedies as sources. Herodotus had als read the Description of the earth by Hecataeus of Miletus (550-490), and sometimes ridicules this Greek geographer. However, we know that in his second book, Herodotus sometimes plagiarized his predecessor.note Another geographer he used, was Scylax of Caryanda, who had visited India and coasted the shores of the Indian Ocean and Persian Gulf. ast but not least, he knows many stories that were told among Greek noble families, among which is one of the two Spartan royal dynasties. We can imagine how he was invited to deliver a lecture, stayed with an aristocratic family, and how he heard the stories about the astonishing achievements of the family, of which he preserved the memory by putting them on record. So, Herodotus combined the results of interviews and family stories, had read the books that were available and knew at least three relevant documents. We may add that he (pretends to have) traveled extensively, so that he can often claim autopsy of a location. The following remark is a good summary of Herodotus' method. Topographer and Ethnographer Herodotus describes amazing customs and habits, and sometimes it is hard to believe him. The Agathyrsi have their women in common, so that they may all be brothers, and, as members of a single family, be able to live together without jealousy and hatred. The Argippaeans are bald. Sacred prostitution is a custom in Babylon. Lydian men don't like to be seen naked. The Neuri can change into werewolves. Every five years, the Thracians choose one of their number by lot and send him to God as a messenger, with instructions to ask him for whatever they may happen to want; to effect the dispatch, some of them with javelins in their hands arrange themselves in a suitable position, while others take hold of the messenger by his hands and feet, and swing him up into the air in such a way as to make him fall upon the upturned points of the javelins.note Herodotus describes all these customs without any trace of bias. Although he is proud to be a Greek and sometimes expresses his surprise about foreign customs, he does not criticize them. (After his death, some of his compatriots were to accuse Herodotus of 'philobarbarism', loving the barbarians.) His respect for other cultures does not mean that he swallows everything. Herodotus sometimes seems to be a bit gullible, but this is just a corollary of his method. Sometimes, he was unable to find a text or a reliable spokesman about an event or place. In those cases, he simply retold the available legends and fairy tales; he usually shows that he does not believe them ('This is what they say, but in my opinion it is just one of those tall stories of the Egyptians'). Not everybody recognized Herodotus' criticism, and we have already seen that in Antiquity and the Middle Ages, he was called Father of Lies. In the sixteenth century, however, it became clear how much variance there is in human behavior. The Aztecs sacrificed humans. Matrilinearity was usual among the Iroquois. The Calmucs were bald. Promiscuity was usual in Samoa. The Siberians told stories about shamans who were able to change into wolves. After these discoveries, the Father of Lies could become the Father of Anthropology. As a topographer, Herodotus has his merits, too. He was the first to understand the relative size and situation Europe, Africa and Asia. He was aware of the fact that the Caspian Sea was surrounded on all sides by land, and knew reports about the circumnavigation of Africa. (Go here for the story, which was generally questioned until Bartolomeus Diaz reached the Cape of Good Hope in 1488.) Herodotus knew that the world was tens of thousands year old;;note; something that was unacceptable to the scientists of the Christian Middle Ages. Sometimes, he is mistaken. For example, he believes that the world is symmetrical. When he compares the Danube and the Nile, he points out that they both divide a continent in two halves, and that their deltas are on the same geographical longitude. Since it is - according to Herodotus - well-known that the sources of the Danube are in the far west, in the Pyrenees, he is positive that the sources of the Nile must be in the west too, in the Atlas mountains. And because the Danube has five mouths, two of the seven branches of the Nile must be canals. This symmetry is not complete: Herodotus knows that it is cold in the north and warm in the south. Between these extremes is Greece, where the climate is very pleasant. The fact that there is an unpleasant climate at the ends of the (flat) earth, is compensated by the natural richness of those far-off lands: cinnamon, gold, tin, amber and all the perfumes of Arabia. Greece is the midpoint of the earth, and the countries that are furthest from Greece have the strangest customs. Thracians weep when a child is born, and are very glad when somebody dies. Indian men have black semen. In the extreme north, there are people who eat other people. Egyptians and Thracians have customs that are the exact opposite of Greek customs. The list of reversals is endless. Herodotus the Moralist To Herodotus the teller of tales, these 'world inverted' stories must have been among his greatest successes. Nothing was more funny to a Greek than to hear about Egypt, where women urinate standing. But Herodotus never presents it as if he is joking. Strange customs have his sincere interest, not his contempt. It is as if he wants to show how much diversity there can be in human culture: other cultures are not just a little bit dissimilar, they can be completely different. Knowing this, the critical observer will understand that he or she can be a complete stranger to others. The only way to cope with other cultures is tolerance, because no society can claim superiority. This is best explained by Herodotus' own words, when he expresses his own feelings about the story of the madness of Cambyses. As we have seen, this Persian king killed the sacred Apis bull, his brother Smerdis, the son of his vizier and twelve noblemen. On top of that, he had started an incestuous affair with two of his sisters and desecrated Egyptian tombs and mummies. In view of all this, I have no doubt that Cambyses was completely out of his mind; it is the only possible explanation of his assault upon, and mockery of, everything which ancient law and custom have made sacred in Egypt. If anyone, no matter who, were given the opportunity of choosing from amongst all the nations in the world the set of beliefs which he thought best, he would inevitably -after careful considerations of their relative merits- choose that of his own country. Everyone without exception believes his own native customs, and the religion he was brought up in, to be the best; and that being so, it is unlikely that anyone but a madman would mock at such things. There is abundant evidence that this is the universal feeling about the ancient customs of one's country. One might recall, for example, an anecdote of Darius. When he was king of Persia, he summoned the Greeks who happened to be present at his court, and asked them what they would take to eat the dead bodies of their fathers. They replied that they would not do it for any money in the world. Later, in the presence of the Greeks, and through an interpreter, so that they could understand what was said, he asked some Indians of the tribe called Callatiae, who do in fact eat their parents' dead bodies, what they would take to burn them. They uttered a cry of horror and forbade him to mention such a dreadful thing. One can see by this what custom can do.note Again: reversion. And more than that: a reversion that shows that people simply must accept that foreign nations have foreign customs. It is useful to take a final look at the list of Cambyses' crimes: the murder of his brother, incest and unjustified executions are mentioned without comment. What causes the above quoted remark, are the killing of the Apis and the profanation of mummies: intolerance is what causes Herodotus' indignation. No one but a madman would mock a foreign culture. In Antiquity, books consisted of papyrus scrolls. Our division of Herodotus' Histories in nine "books" goes back to an edition by third century BCE scholars, working in the great library of Alexandria. There are very strong indications that this is not the original division; probably, Herodotus thought about his oeuvre as a collection of twenty-eight lectures, in Greek called logoi. This overview of the contents of Herodotus' Histories is essentially based on Silvana Cagnazzi's article "Tavola dei 28 logoi di Erodoto" in the journal Hermes 103 (1975), page 385-423, except for book three. Book 1 first logos: the story of Croesus (1.1-94) text: Candaules, his wife, and Gyges text: the story of Arion second logos: the rise of Cyrus the Great (1.95-140) third logos: affairs in Babylonia and Persia (1.141-216) text: The capture of Babylon Book 2 fourth logos: geography of Egypt (2.1-34) fifth logos: customs and animals of Egypt (2.35-99) text: Tyre text: Egyptian customs text: The hippopotamus text: Mummification sixth logos: history of Egypt (2.100-182) text: The relief of Sesostris Book 3 seventh logos: Cambyses' conquest of Egypt (3.1-60) text: The skulls at Pelusium text: The madness of Cambyses eighth logos: the coups of the Magians and Darius (3.61-119, 126-141, 150-160) text: The list of satrapies text: The gold-digging ants text: The edges of the earth text: The fall of Intaphrenes text: The coat of Syloson text: The capture of Babylon ninth logos: affairs on Samos (3.39-60, 120-125, 142-149) Book 4 tenth logos: country and customs of the Scythians (4.1-82) text: The circumnavigation of Africa eleventh logos: Persian campaign against the Scythians (4.83-144) twelfth logos: Persian conquest of Libya (4.145-205) text: The Nasamones Book 5 thirteenth logos: Persian conquest of Thrace (5.1-28) fourteenth logos: beginning of the Ionian revolt; affairs in Sparta (5.28-55) text: The story of Dorieus text: The royal road fifteenth logos: affairs in Athens (5.55-96) sixteenth logos: Ionian revolt (5.97-126) Book 6 seventeenth logos: Persian reconquest of Ionia (6.1-42) eighteenth logos: affairs in Greece (6.43-93) text: Glaucus nineteenth logos: battle of Marathon (6.94-140) Book 7 twentieth logos: Persian preparations (7.1-55) text: Xerxes' ancestors text: Xerxes' canal through the Athos text: Xerxes in Abydus twenty-first logos: the Persians cross to Europe (7.57-137) twenty-second logos: battle of Thermopylae (7.138-239) text: Greek spies at Sardes text: the battle of Himera text: the topography of Thermopylae text: the battle of Thermopylae Book 8 twenty-third logos: naval battle off Artemisium (8.1-39) twenty-fourth logos: naval battle of Salamis (8.40-96) twenty-fifth logos: winter (8.97-144) text: the Macedonian royal dynasty Book 9 twenty-sixth logos: battle of Plataea (9.1-89) twenty-seventh logos: liberation of Ionia (9.90-113) twenty-eighth logos: foundation of the Athenian empire (9.114-122) The End of the Histories Of course it is possible to write a book about the Second World War that begins with the unification of Germany in 1870 and ends in the winter of 1942/1943 with the battles at El Alamein, Stalingrad, and Guadalcanal. It would be unusual, of course, but the war had been decided – the Axis Powers had started to retreat – and the contours of the post-war era had become visible after the signing of the Atlantic Charter and the agreements of Casablanca. The contemporaries were aware of it. Already in May 1943, the illegal newspapers in occupied Europe knew that the Soviet Union and the United States would become the superpowers, that the colonial empires would come to an end, and that a form of European cooperation was to be created in which Germany would also participate. Such a history of the Second World War could thus exist, but most readers will be left with an unsatisfied feeling. After all, the violence did not cease before the capitulation of Japan in August 1945. One might even say that the war came to an end only after the establishment of the NATO and COMECON. If these matters are missing, the reader will wonder whether the historian died prematurely. Herodotus' unfinished Histories Something similar is the case with the Histories of Herodotus of Halicarnassus, which is dedicated to the war between the Persian Empire and the Greek city states at the beginning of the fifth century BCE. Beginning with the unification of the Iranian tribes by the Persian king Cyrus the Great in 559 BCE, it continues with an account of Persian imperialism: the conquest of Lydia, Babylonia, Egypt, Thrace, and Libya. We have already read two thirds of the Histories when the Persians attack the Greek towns for the first time, in 492. Two years later the Persians conquer the Aegean Isles but fail to subdue Athens (in the battle of Marathon). After this first war, there is a pause, but in 480 king Xerxes invades Greece. It is only now, at three quarters of the text, that the real war begins. The story breaks off after the battles at Salamis (480), Plataea, and Mycale (both in 479), although the war was not over yet and Herodotus has not offered an explanation for the fact that the Persians did not return to the west. Probably, the Histories are unfinished. There are clues that Herodotus wanted to proceed beyond the year 479 BCE. For example, in 7.213 he announces that he will describe the fate of the Greek traitor Ephialtes, but he fails to do so. What is missing? In a book about the war between Persians and Greeks, we would have expected the Greek expeditions to the Bosphorus and strategically important Cyprus (478). The Spartan campaign against the Thessalian collaborators of the same year, the founding of the Delian League in the winter of 478/477, the death of Ephialtes (477), and the fall of the last Persian fortress in Europe, Eion, would have been part of the full story as well (476). We would have expected all this: a general account of the war until its logical ending. In addition, there are two clues about the more specific traits of what Herodotos had in store. At the beginning of his work, in 1.106 and 1.184, he announces that he will return to the ancient history of Mesopotamia or, as he calls it, Assyria with its capital Babylon. We may perhaps, perhaps reconstruct the good story that Herodotus missed out on. Return to Babylon After Xerxes’ accession to the Persian throne (in 486 BCE), there were insurrections and one of these took place in Babylonia. The rebels were named Bēl-šimānni and Šamaš-eriba.note Although their revolt was suppressed within five months, the author Arrian states that Babylonia remained unquiet: Xerxes suppressed a revolt on his return from Greece.note Ctesias confirms this: he mentions that Xerxes returned to Persis after a visit to Babylon.note It is possible that Xerxes was forced to break off the Greek war because he had to return to the heartland of his empire. That would also explain why Salamis, Plataea, and Mycale were the last battles. If Herodotus had mentioned the second Babylonian revolt, that would have made the end of the Histories symmetrical with the beginning. The rise of the Persian Empire had begun when Cyrus had captured Babylon the end of the Histories, we would have seen another capture of that city, this time indicating the transience of a Persia that had for the first time been defeated. 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